Flames were shooting 50 feet up when I got to Allen Street the night of February 9th.

This wasn’t some lazy fire. An Allentown street corner was erupting like a rocket engine flipped upside-down. The uncontrolled burn was so intense it seemed likely to pop up somewhere else.

The danger was obvious. Yet 15 minutes after the gas explosion that killed five people and touched off the fire, Allentown firefighters had taken a position just north of the inferno at 13th Street and Allen. In bright, pulsing arcs across Allen Street, high-pressure water streamed south into the blaze.

I wasn’t expecting anything like this. Usually, by the time a news reporter hears about a fire, files a quick report and drives out to the scene, there’s hardly a flicker to see.

Not so this night. Rising from the rubble of the 544 N. 13th St. house of William and Beatrice Hall, this fire was a fury.

* * *

Three hours earlier, I was chatting with eight Cub Scouts of Nazareth Pack 76 on their tour of The Morning Call newsroom. I fumbled to answer a den mother’s question:

“Which news story was the biggest in your years at The Call?”

I wasn’t sure, I said, but I guessed it was the Feb. 19, 1999, explosion that killed five people at the Concept Sciences chemical plant near Lehigh Valley International Airport.

I didn’t write any of the Concept Sciences story, I told the Scouts, but I did hear the explosion when it hit The Morning Call building with a loud thud that night. The shock wave had traveled more than two miles, I remembered.

The Cub Scouts moved on. I went back to my regular night-police reporting. And when something exploded at 13th and Allen streets, less than a mile away, I didn’t hear it.

A few minutes before 10:50 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 9, on a police radio scanner, I heard the word “fireball.” A few seconds later, someone said “explosion.”

I got up to listen more closely.

A dispatcher radioed, “Callers are reporting an explosion and fire at Number 13 and Allen.”

Then someone at the Allentown Communication Center described what he had just seen in a re-play of surveillance video. A house had blown up.

I shouted to David Venditta, the night editor on the far side of the room, that this explosion was serious; I would be going out after I wrote up a short report for our online readers.

“Should I call in photographers?” Venditta asked.

“Yes, call them in.”

Before I left, at 10:58 p.m., I posted this on mcall.com:

“Allentown house explodes”

An explosion was reported in Allentown at 10:45 tonight.

It appears a house has been damaged severely and more than one person injured near 13th and Allen streets.

Police were looking at surveillance video.

“I got it on camera,” an officer radioed. “There’s a large fireball. It looks like an entire house down.”

Firetrucks and ambulances were staging on Liberty and Allen streets between 13th and 14th streets.

A second alarm was called.

As I rushed out of the newsroom, Venditta told me our reporters Christopher Baxter and Andrew McGill were coming in. So were our photographers Monica Cabrera and Rob Kandel.

I took my Jeep up to the neighborhood and parked in the Allen Street gutter snow between 11th and 12th streets. When I got out, the cold air smelled of acrid ash.

Under the streetlights at 12th and Allen, scores of people were taking pictures and talking on cellphones. Most eyes were focused on the yellow glow a block west.

Down the block, houses on the south side of the street – the left side from my vantagepoint -- shielded much of the fire from my view, but flames leaped higher than the rooftops and burst into Allen Street to the right.

I ran toward the fire, hoping to see it better and to find a witness to the explosion.

A young man walked toward me in the dark. “Was anyone hurt?” I asked him.

“Someone said an old lady was in there, but I think she got out OK,” he said.

Someone in there survived? That was hard to believe, looking at the blaze. But then again, I recalled that my uncle Tom Dorsey and cousin Bridget survived a gas explosion that blew up their house in Bangor 50 years ago.

About a half block from the flames, I phoned Venditta back at the newsroom.

“This is big, David,” I said. “It looks like Armageddon at the end of the block.”

“Is anyone hurt?” Venditta asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “A guy here just said he heard an old woman got out alive. But he didn’t really know.”

At 1227 W. Allen St., Lorraine McCallum was out on her open porch.

“I was laying down and I heard the boom,” she said. “It shook my house.” On the enclosed 1229 W. Allen porch next to McCallum’s porch, the blast also had broken a few windows.

Another door down, at 1231 W. Allen, Susan Hodgin-Hein said the blast confused her at first.

“I thought I was back in Vietnam,” he said. “It sounded like a 122 mm rocket.”

In the 25-degree cold, my fingers were almost numb as I jotted notes on a notepad.

I still couldn’t see the full fire. The Elison house across 13th Street from the blaze blocked my view of the fire’s core. I wondered what exactly was burning. It had not yet dawned on me that the main thing fueling this fire was invisible.

When I tried to walk closer to 13th Street, city police appeared. They were herding everyone back toward 12th Street. I told a police officer I was with the newspaper and wanted only a brief look from the alley, Richland Street.

“Just let me go up to that corner for two seconds,” I asked the officer. “I want to get one look at the whole thing.”

That alley corner was no more than 50 feet away, but the officer shook his head.

“Look, I love The Morning Call,” he said. “But I can’t let you up there.”

I was disappointed, but it certainly was a polite way to say no.

(A day later, I found out that the spot I’d hoped to move to was right in front of the 1239 Allen St. home of Sheila Guzman, the only person known to have been looking directly at the Halls’ house when it exploded. More on Guzman in a later post.)

I lingered in the middle of the block, near the Heins’ porch, for about a half hour. Two aerial fire trucks rolled by, left to right, toward the fire. Firefighters rolled out an incredibly long hose from a hydrant at 12th and Allen to a truck stopped at 13th and Allen.

Then, in the slight breeze from the west, a giant smoke cloud dropped into the block.

Through the thick haze, I saw a crew extending a fire truck ladder far above the flames. And as a single firefighter took up a hose in a bucket equipped with spotlights, he, his ladder and lights disappeared in the smoke.

Time to move, I thought, but I had second thoughts. I already had a useful location right here, inside the yellow crowd-control tape and not too far from the fire. I wondered if moving out would put me where I couldn’t see anything at all.

But I moved. I went back to 12th Street. Now most of the spectators were gone, probably tired of the cold and smoke. I ducked outside the yellow tape and turned south. The first alley, Andrew Street, had tape and a fire police officer. No point trying to sneak in here.

There was no yellow tape at the next alley, Early Street, which was almost completely covered with ice. I slipped and slid west on Early and, to my surprise, the alley led all the way to 13th Street.

Thirteenth was taped off in yellow, but it didn’t matter. It was all there to see. Here was a clear view of the whole disaster.

Up 13th Street and to the left, smoke and flames billowed from what had been the Hall and Cruz houses. The smoke cloud drifted east, to the right. A few minutes earlier, I was under that cloud.

Just this side of the fire, six red-brick and white duplex houses were still standing, though the smoke wafting from their rooftops was evidence of fire inside. Firefighters high and low were soaking the blaze from all sides.

Right in front of me two fire trucks pumped water through a tangle of fire hoses. Under one firefighter’s hose spray, telephone and electric lines across 13th Street had grown icicles.

The MAB Paints store to the left and the evacuated Gross Towers senior home in the distance appeared to be safe. An hour into the fire, it seemed things weren’t going to get much worse.

Six other people watched with me next to the Polanco home at the end of the alley. I asked if any of them had seen the explosion. None had. But like the Allen Street residents, all had heard it.

Jennifer Sanchez heard the blast from her home at 10th and Oak streets. She left her young son with her mother and walked the few blocks to see what happened.

“I was in my living room and the windows shook, the door shook,” Sanchez said. “I felt the explosion in my chest. It was like being close to a gunshot.”

She watched and wondered how long this fire would burn. I watched until past midnight. The blaze frequently flared, but it seemed vaguely under control. I called Venditta to say I was coming in from the cold.

Back at the newsroom, everyone was busy rebuilding Page 1 and Page 7 to get the Allentown explosion story and pictures in the final edition of the Feb. 10 newspaper.

Venditta was on the phone with Andrew McGill, who had just interviewed one of the more than 200 evacuees bused at 12:30 a.m. to the Agri-Plex building at the Allentown Fairgrounds.

“He saw someone on fire?” Venditta asked. McGill apparently said yes. Then Venditta started repeating McGill’s end of the conversation loudly. I guessed Venditta wanted his voice to reach Chris Baxter, who was sitting a few desks away writing the story at a computer.

“Donald O’Shall of 536 N. 13th St. said a dining room door frame hit him in the explosion,” Venditta said, relaying McGill’s words. “He said that when he went out to the street and looked at a burning house, at least one person on the second floor was on fire.”

Wow. Finally, I thought, we have an eyewitness. We’d begun to find out what the blast had done to people.

Baxter had looked up Lehigh County property records and found the names of the couple who owned the house that took the direct hit at 544 N. 13th St.: William and Beatrice Hall.

Had O’Shall seen one of the Halls in that burning house? And how badly was that person hurt? We didn't know.

Baxter said that, in the police radio reports he had been monitoring, emergency officials had radioed that one firefighter and three other people were hurt, but no broadcast had even hinted at a death.

Could that person “on fire” on the second floor have escaped alive?

It was 12:40 a.m., and we needed as much reliable information as we could get on injuries by 1 a.m., when we’d have to release Pages 1 and 7 to the plate-makers and the press.

Almost two hours after an explosion brought down the Halls’ house -- and half of the Cruz house next door -- it seemed that someone had to have solid facts on injuries. But who?

Someone mentioned that a CNN TV reporter had just talked with a spokesman for Lehigh Valley Hospital about injuries from the explosion. I called the spokesman, Robert Stevens, at his home.

Stevens said he was not sure how many were hurt in the explosion, but one person was taken to LVH-Cedar Crest.

“We are treating one bystander, somebody who was apparently across the street,” Stevens said. He said he did not believe the person’s injuries were life-threatening.

Next I called Allentown police Capt. George Medero. This night he was the police information officer. I asked him if he knew whether anyone was injured or killed in the explosion.

“The fire department is stilling working on it,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But we’re about to go to press with our story. We just want to know if you can say anyone was hurt. Was at least one person hurt?”

“Once this thing is done, we’ll have more information,” Medero said.

In other words, we’d have to wait.

Baxter didn’t include Stevens’ or Medero’s comments in the story we went to press with. The story had O’Shall’s quote about the person on fire, and the police radio reports of four injured. That's really all we had to go with.

The front page of our fifth and final edition had the headline, “Fire and Destruction: Explosion in Allentown,” at the top, above Monica Cabrera’s photo of the fire and rubble.

The headline and photo referred readers to the story on Page 7, where there were two more pictures by Cabrera and Rob Kandel.

In earlier Feb. 10 editions the front page was topped with “After storms, snow must go - quickly.” That story by Spencer Soper and Chris Baxter was about the fines Lehigh Valley residents faced for failing to shovel their sidewalks. Now the snow story had moved to the middle of Page 1, just below the fire package.

The story of the explosion would soon be on its way to our print readers, and yet there was so much of the story left to discover. As we found more facts this early morning, we'd update the story online.

Shortly after 1 a.m., Baxter phoned Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski, who was on vacation in Florida. Did the mayor know anything about blast injuries? He said only that he had been made aware of “casualties.” He was not specific.

By now, McGill had moved from the Agri-Plex evacuation center to the fire department command post set up at the edge of the Allen Street Shopping Center, at 14th and Allen. At 2 a.m., I went out to relieve him.

When I got there, McGill was standing on a snow pile at the corner. The fire was beyond him, to the east, still raging as firefighters continued pouring water from the high ladders.

McGill looked cold, even with his pea coat on.

“Andrew, get a hat,” I said.

“Yeah,” he laughed. “I probably should get some socks, too.”

I looked down. He was wearing loafers on bare feet.

McGill left me at a corner clogged with firefighters from throughout the Lehigh Valley. On 14th Street were two large vans, holding various emergency officials. Along Allen Street, a string of firefighters’ tents had gone up.

Television crews were positioning cameras in anticipation of a press briefing by Allentown Fire Chief Robert Scheirer.

A few others were there, too, watching. One was Jason Soke, who lives at 16th and Tilghman streets. He told me he was one of the first people at the blast scene.

“There were bricks everywhere,” he said. “It blew pieces of the house across the street. I thought, holy cow! I was stunned. I think even the firefighters were stunned.”

I called Venditta with an update, and he had some important information for me. He said Mark Hall, son of William and Beatrice Hall, might be here at the command post.

Venditta had found Mark Hall’s Bethlehem phone number. Baxter dialed it up at 2:15 a.m., and Hall’s father-in-law answered the phone. The father-in-law revealed that Hall and his wife had gone to the fire scene.

This was bad. If Mark Hall’s parents had only been injured, he’d probably be visiting them in a hospital, not passing time here.

Venditta, who had checked voters registration records, said William and Beatrice Hall were 79 and 74 years old, respectively, and their son was 49. I told Venditta I’d keep an eye out for the 49-year-old Mark Hall.

Just before 3 a.m., Fire Chief Scheirer stepped in front of the press and the TV cameras.

“At this point, we’re not sure if we have any fatalities,” he said. “It’s going to be a long night sifting through the debris.”

A television reporter asked about the safety of Allentown’s natural gas pipes. Scheirer said that would be investigated.

“Is anyone missing?” I asked.

“Yes, we do have reports of people who are unaccounted for,” the chief said.

A TV reporter asked how many were missing. Scheirer said he knew of two.

“Is one of the missing 79 years old and the other 74?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

This was the first official confirmation we had that the two people who lived in the house at 544 N. 13th St. were affected by the explosion.

I jumped in my Jeep and called Venditta. He had seen the news briefing on TV, so he didn’t really need an update. He asked me if I had seen anyone from UGI, the gas company.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, everyone’s asking, why is it taking so long to cut off the natural gas to the fire? Isn’t UGI out there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t seen UGI all night.”

When we hung up, I took a good look around the shopping center parking lot. There was a UGI vehicle parked right next to me. In fact, within 20 yards there were two UGI trucks, two UGI vans, and two UGI cars.

I called Venditta back.

“David, I have to correct something I just told you,” I said. “UGI is all over the place.”

At 3:45 a.m., McGill returned to the Allen Street command post, and I went back to the newsroom. Baxter had just discovered we had a file photo of William and Beatrice Hall. The picture, taken by Cabrera in 2008, showed the couple voting at a city polling place.

At the online desk, Stephanie Sigafoos, who had been updating our website all night, immediately posted the photo. Now the news story had faces.

On the police radio, firefighters now commented that the fire was weakening. Five hours after the explosion, UGI had plugged off the gas.

I went to the newsroom library at about 4 a.m. From an old Morning Call and Evening Chronicle file cabinet, I pulled a tiny Manila envelope marked “William I. Hall and Mrs. William I. Hall.” Seven musty news clippings were inside.

The clips document William Hall’s Army service in the Korean War; his 1958 engagement and marriage to Beatrice L. Cordero; the 1961 birth of their son, Mark Andrew; and Beatrice Hall’s 1962 progress as an artistic painter.

The articles repeatedly mention that both were Allen High School graduates, William having been born in Allentown; and Beatrice, a New Jersey transplant who spent most of her life in the city.

It seemed they had lived the modern history of Allentown -- from Allen High to Allen Street.

At 4:40 a.m., McGill notified us that the Halls weren’t the only ones missing after the explosion. Chief Scheirer had just reported that four other people also were unaccounted for.

At 4:45 a.m., a firefighter radioed, “We’ve found something. Someone tell the chief.” The firefighter had urgency in his voice.

Another voice radioed, “Ninety-nine.”

I turned to the police code sheet on my desk.

In the code, “99” or “10-99” means “Notify the coroner.”

-- Frank Warner

* * *

Later Thursday, Feb. 10, relatives said the two Halls had died, and that, in the 542 N. 13th St. house owned by Manuel Cruz, three others died. The three others were Ofelia Ben, 69; Ben’s granddaughter Katherine Cruz, 16; and Katherine Cruz’s son, 4-month-old Matthew Manuel Vega.

Manuel Cruz, 42, who bought the house in 2009, survived because he was working on Long Island, N.Y., the night of the blast. He lost his mother, also known as "Tia Gracita"; his daughter, who was an Allen High sophomore; and his grandson.

One person on Scheirer’s list of six missing was found alive and well, and accounted for.

Current Comments

I had other material to comment with, but given the remarkable content length for Frank's behind the scenes THRILLER here, decided at the last minute to simply preserve it.

Only three comments are necessary for the readership.

First, aside from putting yourself under multitudinous risks of great danger on that night; as is typical of you, you exemplify another facet and gift of great writers - conciseness.

Second, if it were up to me personally, I'd nominate this post for an award within the trade for its journalistic excellence - as a story like this is its lifeblood and life's blood.

Third, my deepest condolences to all in this community who went through this. This may be a magnificent work, but truly, it's a crying shame it ever needed to be published at all. My heart is with all for their losses, great and small. Because for that, there are no words.

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Posted By: Allentonian | Feb 23, 2011 6:21:19 PM

So sorry to read about this explosion. We lived close to the Sunrise Propane explosion in Toronto, and I can empathize completely.

Now I am waiting for in-depth reporting on the issue of gas safety in housing.

Whether we are talking about explosions, carbon monoxide poisoning or low level carbon monoxide emissions (usually not even caught), there is a lot of evidence to suggest that using gas for heating a home or cooking is a bad idea.

How many explosions and deaths will it be before we stop buying the line that natural gas is "safe"?

There are other options - I'd love to see a movement to eliminate gas lines from residential areas entirely.

Posted By: Anna | Feb 24, 2011 1:44:20 AM

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